


Hold Up A Mirror

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Marvel Polyship Bingo, Polyamory, Prompt Fill, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22418650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Tony knew his soulmates were dead before he hit puberty. He saw them every time he looked in the mirror, two ghosts following him around forever.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 46
Kudos: 836
Collections: Marvel Polyship Bingo 2020, StarkSpangledWinter Wonderland Event





	Hold Up A Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> For the Marvel Polyship Bingo, Square G2: Soulmates
> 
> Winter Wonderland Prompt #65: Soulmate AU where one can see their soulmate in the mirror. If their soulmate is alive, they see them instead of their reflection. If their soulmate is dead, they see their soulmate standing next to them instead. Tony has always been able to see a blond and a brunet man standing next to him.

Tony was seven when he learned that he wasn’t ever going to meet his soulmate. 

The thrill of the forbidden thrummed in his bones as he snuck into his mother’s room. Even though he knew, intellectually, that he couldn’t possibly be the first kid to sneak a peak at a mirror before their thirteenth birthday, that didn’t diminish the delicious feeling of danger and adventure. The call of the unknown reverberated in the child-sized chambers of his heart, almost but not quite like the allure of electricity and metal and  _ science. _

He felt like Promethius stealing fire from the gods. 

And why should he wait for his mirror day, when everyone would be looking at him as he stood solemnly in front of some lavishly-ornamented full body mirror and prepared himself to look into the unseeing eyes of his soulmate for the first time? Why should he let hoards of hungry eyes watch him like wolves on the hunt, analyzing every twitch of his face so they could plaster his reaction across tabloid covers in every grocery store check out aisle in the country? The ceremony certainly wouldn’t be private- his mother would surely invite her society friends, at least. 

The door to his mother’s room loomed like the great gates of some old gothic manor. All he had to do was continue past them, and the adventure would begin in earnest. 

His heart pounded in his ears, urging him forward and onward. He strained for any sound that might indicate that his parents were home early from their party, but the manor was as silent as a cemetery, and the only footsteps were his own. 

He wasn’t one for  _ romance, _ really- no, that was for  _ girls. _ But he still liked the idea of a soulmate. The idea that there was someone out there just for him, who the universe was so sure would love him that they’d sewn their reflection to him like Wendy sewed Peter Pan’s shadow to his body sat in his stomach like warm, thick soup on a damp, dreary day. 

He’d tried to spot his reflection in the windows for months, but he was just too short to really get a good look, and whenever Jarvis caught him trying to stand on a stool or something he’d gently lift him down and tell him that he must wait. 

But thirteen years was far too long to wait. 

His mother’s bedroom came with an opulent bathroom, complete with a full-wall mirror. He was too small to see himself in it clearly with the makeup counter and sinks in the way, but if he could climb up on top of it, he’d be able to see just fine. 

With a deep breath, he put his little hands up on the thick marble countertop and stepped onto the handle of one of the drawers containing his mother’s makeup, hair products, and toothpaste. He kept as much of his weight as possible on his trembling hands, to avoid accidentally breaking the handles off the drawers, and kept his gaze focused on his fingertips so he wouldn’t see his soulmate until he was all the way up on the counter. 

You only got to see your soulmate for the first time once, after all. He didn’t want his first glimpse of them to be half-obscured by the faucet or his own hair. 

Eventually, he managed to get his entire body up on the countertop. His arms trembled even though they were no longer supporting his weight, and he was sweating, but he’d made it. 

He looked into the mirror and saw three people looking back at him. 

His heart seized as though suddenly caught in the coils of a constrictor. The middle face, one he recognized from family pictures and magazine covers, stared back at him in horrified realization, while the two men on either side of him put their hands on his shoulders in twin gestures of comfort. 

Everyone knew how soulmates worked. Once your personality had settled, they appeared as your reflection every time you saw yourself in a mirror or reflected back in a window. They stayed that way even after you met them, always reflecting how they looked at the moment, so they would be easy to spot when you finally met them in person. Only after they died could you see your own reflection. Then they stood beside you in the mirror, with you in the glass the way they could no longer be in flesh.

Some called it the universe’s showing its mercy; even when your soulmate was dead, all you had to do was look in a mirror and you’d see them right there, standing next to you in the mirror. Others called it cruel, a constant reminder that the only time you’d ever be with them again was in death. That it doomed soulmates left behind to be haunted by the one who had died first. 

Tears prickled at Tony’s eyes as he looked at his dead soulmates.

The one on the left, a small, pale-faced man with blonde hair, said something to him, lips moving soundlessly, while the man on the right, a brunette dressed in an old-fashioned military uniform, just squeezed his shoulder so that his reflection’s shirt rumpled under his fingers. 

He didn’t even feel a whisper of the touch on his own skin. 

* * *

As he grew up, he learned not to look in mirrors whenever possible. There was no escaping pain in life, but that didn’t mean he had to go out looking to get punched in the gut. 

There were some times he couldn’t get around it. Before interviews or major social events, he always had to look hard into the mirror to make sure he was presentable. His mother offered to teach him how to look past your soulmates to see your own reflection, and he accepted just to avoid telling her the truth. 

As he got older, he managed to avoid it less and less. Jarvis could scan him with his cameras and tell him if he was presentable. When he took over SI, he could pick venues for company events that didn’t involve lots of mirrors or glass, and he quickly became known for his fondness of windowless buildings. He still saw their reflections sometimes, but he managed to all but forget about the most of the time. 

Then, he went to Afghanistan to show off the Jericho, and his life shattered. 

* * *

Sometime between crawling out of that cave in Afghanistan and Obie dying, both his body and his trust trashed, he listened to the news and tinkered on the Iron Man gauntlets the way a convicted man listens to his sentence. 

_ “We don’t yet know how many casualties there have been in Gulmira, the small Afghani town that only recently managed to get out from under terrorist rule-” _

He looked up from the delicate wires and screws, into the glass wall separating the lab from the staircase. As always, his soulmates were waiting for him. The small blond one stood behind him, arms draped over his shoulders, while the brown haired one knelt by his feet, one hand on Tony’s knee, the other on the floor to help him keep his balance. His eyes must have started watering up a bit, since their faces were a little blurrier than usual. 

What a fucking joke. Who ever thought seeing your soulmates like this was a  _ good  _ thing? Who honestly thought that when you were beat down and licking your wounds, what you needed was to see the affection and comfort you couldn’t ever have?

And worst of all, he had to see himself reflected there. 

‘Himself’ was the last person he wanted to see right now. 

Obie’s betrayal, his frustration at being unable to stop his own company from fueling the carnage on the TV screen, and the residual fear and despair from Afghanistan braided together into a thick, potent cord of rage. It was like a fire in the wind, blowing every which way; first he raged at Obie, then at himself, then Raza and the Ten Rings, then Howard, then himself again, around and around until he was dizzy with it. 

_ “There is little hope for these refugees-” _

The decision came on slowly, then all at once, like a glacier dam melting drip by drip until it was too weak to hold the enormous lake trapped behind it from flooding out and washing away everything in its path. 

Slowly, deliberately, he raised the gauntlet and aimed it at himself. The little sickly one opened his mouth in alarm, and tried to reach out to grab his arm and push it down, but his weak little stick arms were no match for Tony’s own work-thickened muscles. 

It was time to leave his ghosts behind. They were just a useless distraction from what he needed to do. 

_ rrrrRRRR-Boom! _

All three faces shattered in a flash of blue repulser light, leaving the dark emptiness of the unlit stairwell up to the main floor, and Iron Man was born. 

Time to go and do something good for once. 

* * *

He didn’t look in the mirror anymore after that. Soulmates were nothing but a pretty distraction, and he was suddenly a very busy man. He had companies to rebuild from the ground up, terrorists to take down, refugees to feed and shelter and provide legal council for, and new scientific fields to revolutionize. 

Within the week he’d set up a green energy testing program, which involved hooking people’s houses up to a variety of clean energy sources, some based on less weaponizable arc reactor set ups, some based on other ideas. Within the month, he’d created and staffed a new wing of R&D with promising scientists who’d done work in renewable energy and tasked them with scaling the more successful areas of the program. By the three month mark, most major cities across the globe had at least one new Stark Energy Center generating the power needed to fuel their public transport and government buildings, and the sales for private energy sources for personal use had earned more for the company than the past five years of weapons contracts, despite the heavily slashed prices. 

“Pricing average citizens out of clean, renewable energy kind of defeats the purpose of the project,” he told the reporters who caught him in the thirty feet between the entrance to the New York City Hall and the car. “I’ll give the things away if I have to.”

Within the year Manhattan was lit up arc-reactor blue every night, and Tony had managed not to let his eyes stray to a mirror. 

He was a new man now. Tony Stark the uncaring playboy was dead, and there was no use wasting his time staring at a dead man’s dead soulmates and hoping for some sort of cosmic comfort. 

* * *

It wasn’t long before SHIELD agents started crawling out of the woodwork, asking him to come take his fresh start and waste it following the orders of shady men in suits for the Greater Good in the name of patriotism and guilt for his past actions. 

First it was Agent Agent turning up on his doorstep, file in hand and bulletproof bland smile in place. 

“Good afternoon, Mr. Stark. You didn’t show up to your SHIELD debrief this morning.”

“Probably because I didn’t schedule one.”

“Mr. Stark, it would be better for everyone if you would just cooperate. It is essential that we hear from you what exactly happened in that cave. It concerns national security.”

“I’ll pass, thanks, I’m pretty sure there’s no law saying torture victims have to go tell their local shady government agencies all about it afterwards.”

Agent Agent tried to reach out and grab his elbow as he walked away. The pressure of his fingers on Tony’s skin made him want to scream. 

_ He had chosen his path, and no one was going to pull him from it.  _

“Security!” he called, voice calm and flippant as if he was in front of a mob of flashing cameras. Behind him he heard the sound of Happy tackling Coulson, who was surely well trained enough to know not to fight security in the home of the most visible man in the world. 

* * *

“Hey J, you up?”

“Always, Sir. Would you like to review the test data for the new solar power cells, or continue drafting the anti-tampering fail safes for the new reactor models?”

“Send them both to R&D, buddy, Daddy has something different in mind today.”

He grabbed a collapsed holoscreen hovering in midair and threw it up against the solid titanium walls he’d put up to replace the glass he’d broken months ago. The lines of soothing blue light expanded outwards to reveal a picture of the SHIELD logo and a security footage still of Coulson entering the building. 

“Oh lovely,” Jarvis said. “I  _ was _ starting to think it had been too long since your last sparring match with the American government.”

“You know me, J. Never happy unless I’m sticking it to the man. Now, if I can find you a backdoor somewhere, do you think you could weasel your way into SHIELD’s remotely-accessible systems, see what sort of dirty laundry you can find in their hamper? I wanna know if they just want the suit, or if I’m gonna have to play them a little different than those military stiffs Rhodey has to report to.”

“Of course, Sir. I look forward to reading endless identical electronic pay stubs and evidence of flagrant but unprosecuteable law-breaking.”

“That’s the spirit.”

His fingers flew through the air, tapping at keys as insubstantial as his soulmates in the air. Lines of code scrawled across the holoscreen, almost faster than he could follow. Numbers and letters and commands chased each other through the air, bringing him up against firewalls and traps and checkpoints, each falling away before his flying fingers until suddenly there was no more code to cut through. 

Some of his frantic energy leaked out of his tense muscles, leaving him dizzy and tired but far too focused to ever fall asleep.

“There you go J. Work your magic.”

* * *

Jarvis found way more than pay stubs and low-level fraud. 

Whatever SHIELD had initially been, it was now a publically-funded hive for a Nazi death cult that was supposed to have died back in World War II. The evidence was hard to see only because it was so intrinsic to the organization. Every level, every department, every office had at least one HYDRA plant, if not all but openly functioning as a HYDRA cell. It was like trying to find a footprint in a mudflat that had been stampeded over; there were so many footprints they all blended together and smooshed each other into indistinguishability. 

HYDRA’s tentacles were wrapped around other institutions too- Congress, the U.N., even the fucking _ New York State Fair, _ Jesus Christ. But their biggest hidey-hole in the States was SHIELD, and just a half-hour ago there had been a SHIELD agent inside the Tower, trying to get him to come have a nice little  _ chat _ with them, had  _ touched _ him-

He needed to do something. Anger and fear burned hot and dangerous inside him, like at any moment they’d rage out of control and burn him up from the inside. 

“J, get me a list of weapons suppliers incriminated in the evidence we have so far, then start doing a deep dive. Update me when you’ve finished. It’s time for Iron Man to get back to work.”

* * *

The headlines started coming in hot and heavy almost immediately. 

_ “A Kantmann Co. warehouse was attacked by an unknown arsonist last night,” _ reported a suitably serious-looking news anchor as Tony worked getting the bullet holes out of the metal. He’d be saving himself a lot of work if he could just make the thing truly bulletproof, but he didn’t want to sink any time into nonessentials when he had business to attend to. 

Then again, he was already sinking so much time into touch-up work afterwards that it might save him time in the long run. 

_ “This is the fifth site associated with the Department of Defense to be attacked in the last week. Senior analysts at the Pentagon have responded to these acts of terrorism by creating a special task force dedicated to catching the masked culprit.” _

Funny, how they said “associated with the Department of Defense” so they wouldn’t have to say “weapons manufacturer” or, better yet, “arms dealer.” Those words probably didn’t evoke quite the sense of sympathy and patriotic outrage they were going for. 

“Got anything for me, Jarvis? What sort of dirty laundry does SHIELD have that’s worth hanging out where people can see it?”

“Sir, I am still confirming some details, and so can not give you a report with a satisfactory level of surety at this time. However, the preliminary results are quite disturbing.”

“Hit me with it as soon as you’re sure.”

“It should only be a few minutes more, Sir.”

A few minutes later, Tony looked at the results and collapsed into his chair. 

HYDRA, the WWII Nazi cult was back, and they were controlling SHIELD like one of those freaky parasites that get in animal’s brains and make them do dumb stuff. 

He took a few seconds to absorb that information. Then, he set about making a plan of attack. Setting fire to things had helped calm him down a bit, but now it was time to get down to business. He knew who the bad guys were, now it was time to start taking them down.

“Jarvis, open a new project. Title it “Too Many Heads, Not Enough Brains.”

* * *

It took a solid couple of weeks for Tony to break down and look in the mirror again. 

The problem with no longer spending his nights in dimly lit rooms full of people and music and not a reflective surface in sight, unless you counted the wine glasses cut with geometric patterns so you couldn’t see anything in them, was that it was harder to avoid mirrors. Pepper and Rhodey got sick of him calling them to ask if he looked good every time he wanted to avoid looking in the bathroom mirror, and Jarvis just didn’t have the critical eye he needed. 

It didn’t help that he was constantly at schools and hospitals, whose bathrooms almost always came with huge wall mirrors, or that the new Experimental Medical Research Building he helped fund ended up having huge glass windows on every floor, or that the new elevators at the Los Angeles SI offices had mirrors on the inside. Eventually he just got unlucky.

The mirror that got him in the end was at a Brooklyn high school bathroom, where he’d had to go clean himself up after an unfortunate spill in one of the advanced Chemistry classes he’d done a guest lab in. It was battered, and someone had sharpied a couple of stick figures along the bottom, but it still fulfilled its purpose. 

Tony carefully washed his face off, washed his hands and forearms, then gave himself a once-over with his fingers before glancing up at the mirror for a quick confirmation that he’d gotten everything before leaving. 

Only to catch a glimpse of himself and freeze. 

He could no longer see his own reflection. 

In his place stood two strangers. The man on the left had a similar facial structure and hair color to the waif he’d seen in the mirror throughout his childhood, but that was where the resemblance ended. The man in  _ this _ mirror was well past six feet, with a torso like a triangle with the point flowing into thick, strong legs. 

On the other side stood a similarly-built man with dark, shaggy hair and only one arm. His eyes were blank and staring, and a starburst of stars radiated out from the ragged stump of his arm. He looked like he could die without noticing. 

He had new soulmates. 

_ And they were alive. _

He nearly collapsed right then and there on the cool bathroom tile. 

* * *

He went back to the classroom and hosted lab for the next two classes like nothing had happened. The desire to go looking for them immediately, to tear apart the digital world searching for some trace of them, burned in his veins, but he pushed it down. 

Destroying HYDRA was more important. In a few more weeks, maybe months, he’d be ready to take them down in one fell swoop. It would have gone faster, perhaps, if there had been someone he could trust to help him with it, but Rhodey was deployed and Pepper was already at capacity dealing with the public-facing side of his assault on all things Nazi Cult. The foundations and initiatives he’d created in the past week alone were enough to keep her busy. 

He’d gone his whole life thinking he’d never meet his soulmates. He could afford to wait a little while longer. 

* * *

HYDRA tried to strike back, of course, but it didn’t matter how many heads they had if they didn’t know where to look. 

Tony leaned so hard into his new public persona of Benevolent Inventor with Money to Burn on Guilt Projects, he was kinda surprised the conspiracy theorists didn’t start talking about how it was all an elaborate public cover for something so nefarious and illegal even he couldn’t get away with it. He joked with Pepper about packing his schedule so full with speaking engagements at STEM programs and conferences on alternative energy sources so he could have a reason to miss the stuffier board meetings, and she joked right back about all those vacancies he still hadn’t filled since kicking out all of Obie’s cronies. 

Then, when he had a moment to himself, he jumped into the Iron Man suit and stole HYDRA hard drives and paper files and blew up the base behind him. 

Base by base he began collecting all the evidence he needed to expose HYDRA with minimum room for cover-ups or violence. JARVIS was working on cracking files and tracking known HYDRA agents nearly 24/7, and the evidence was almost one hundred percent water-tight. 

As he worked, he started renewing some of his old contacts on Capitol Hill, and shamelessly throwing support behind anything he thought might diminish HYDRA’s power. And now that he was paying attention to politics, god damn but there were some nasty laws on the books or headed that way. It was almost like no one in government understood even a single piece of technology invented in the past two decades. 

Then one day someone tried to assassinate him. 

One moment he was sitting down on the balcony of his Malibu house, enjoying the warm glow of the sun on his skin and the smell of salt on the air as he read over a handful of proposals sent in from promising young scientists looking to one of several newly-funded grant programs he’d set up, and the next there was a bullet shooting up between his legs and the wood of his chair was splintering with a crack like a tree trunk snapping in half. 

He scrambled out of the chair, heart pounding erratically and vision flickering with shadows of Afghanistan. 

“Jarvis, Iron Man, now!”

Jarvis, bless his appropriately safety-conscious-weighted decision network, didn’t remind him that the armor recall function was still buggy as hell and just did it. 

The next shot came a few seconds later, tearing a chunk out of the deck and only blocked from punching through his lungs by the timely appearance of the Iron Man chest plate. 

“Jarvis, try and get a camera on the shooter. They’re shooting from below-”

A metal arm thrust up from below the deck and grabbed onto the edge, like a drowning person grabbing onto the lip of a lifeboat. Each metal finger bit deeply into the concrete, leaving divots and a small cloud of concrete dust around each one. 

More pieces of the suit came flying, but they come one-by-one and only half of them have come, each one slamming into him hard enough to knock him off balance. The deck is thin, just a band of space between the rounded edges of the building and the floor-to-ceiling windows looking into the house. Running wasn’t going to work unless he could take to the sky in the next few seconds. 

The metal arm flexes, rippling plates catching the sun and Tony’s attention, and then an enormous man vaulted up onto the deck. 

The strange prosthetic stretched all the way up to his shoulder, where it disappeared under his leather tactical suit. Matching black mask and pair of goggles hid his entire face and would have given him a sort of Darth-Vader look were it not for the shoulder-length greasy brown hair. 

He looked up at Tony, raised his gun, then collapsed as the Iron Man suit’s left foot clocked him in the back of the head on the way to Tony. 

“Well, I’ll take it,” Tony said, before blasting the unconscious man’s bionic murder-weapon arm off, just ot be safe.

* * *

He restrained the guy in his workshop and put everything on high-alert. 

The assassin was in bad shape. His heartbeat and breathing were both all over the place, and he almost woke up about a dozen times even though Tony kept giving him bigger and bigger doses of chemical magic that should keep him down for a solid eight hours. If he had the equipment on hand to run some tests on his blood, he wouldn’t be surprised to find it full of drugs. 

Tony removed his goggles and mask right away so Jarvis could scan the web for pictures of him, but no matches immediately popped up. 

The mystery of who sent him was solved when a small team of guys with guns tried to storm the house, only to get taken out by the house’s defense systems. Once they realized they’d been caught, they each declared ‘Hail Hydra’ and started foaming at the mouth from cyanide pills hidden in their teeth. 

Tony was pretty sure he recognized some of them from SHIELD, but he checked just to be safe. Sure enough, the entirety of Strike Team Delta was beginning to attract flies by his pool. 

So, HYDRA wanted to kill Tony Stark. The question was, did they want him dead because they knew he was Iron Man, because they’d caught on that he was hacking their files, or because he’d gotten that Police Surveillance Bill killed in the House? Or perhaps some combination of those reasons?

“Sir,” Jarvis called over the intercom. “I believe I have discovered your attacker’s identity.”

“Nice work, J. Anyone I know?”

“I believe this is the Winter Soldier, Sir. The man referenced in the Baton Rouge files, and perhaps in the unretrievable files from Odessa.”

Well shit. 

* * *

When the Winter Soldier woke up, he didn’t try and attack, or even to get off the spare table Tony had stuck him on. He just opened his eyes, glanced around, and laid back down to stare at the ceiling. 

It was unnerving. 

He didn’t move as Tony approached to get a better look at his face. Not even a flicker of his eyes. 

Looking at him all laid out like this, mask gone and metal arm blown off, it was obvious that this man shared all of his features with the one-armed man in his new soulmate reflection. But it was difficult to immediately recognize them as the same; the man in the mirror was steady and self-assured. This man oozed a sort of fearful indifference. 

“So. You’re my soulmate, huh? Gotta say, ‘tried to kill me’ is pretty out there as how-I-found-my-soulmate stories go. We’re definitely going to be able to pull that out at parties.”

At the sound of his voice the man’s eyes shot to the side to focus unblinkingly on his face. The intensity of his expression made Tony stumble back a step. 

“You’re the man in the mirror,” the assassin said. “I’m not supposed to look at you. It makes me malfunction.”

He didn’t seem too inclined to follow that rule. His eyes roved up and down Tony’s body, drinking in the sight of him like a parched plant drinking in water. 

“Do you feel a malfunction coming on now?” Tony asked. 

The man smiled. “This conversation is a malfunction.”

Then he leaned over and threw up all over the floor and passed out immediately after. 

* * *

The man, who didn’t know his name and referred to himself only as the Asset, turned out to be a brainwashed super soldier that HYDRA liked to throw in the freezer when they didn’t need him, and who had sustained a  _ lot _ of brain damage as a result of their methods for controlling him. 

From what Tony could piece together from his confused ramblings, he’d been born early in the twentieth century, probably somewhere in the twenties, and that he was obsessed with some tiny little been sprout of a boy the same age as him named Steve. Tony figured the two people he used to see in his reflection were this man and Steve as they existed way back when. 

His avoidance of mirrors made it difficult to pinpoint when his reflection had changed from dead, old-timey Asset-and-Steve to their current iterations, but he made a note to look into it. There was literature, were even documented cases out there speculating that soulmates could change if a person underwent a radical enough personal change, and Afghanistan was pretty life-changing. Could it have something to do with that? No, he’d seen them once after, in the lab while he watched the reports on the refugees. 

Yes, that was the last time he’s seen them- when he shattered the lab glass with his repulsors and decided to become Iron Man. 

He tried to ask the Asset’s opinion only once. The Asset, unfortunately, did not like talking about the past when he was coherent. 

Not that Tony could blame him. The bits and pieces he picked up on where horrific. 

As time went by, the man’s incoherent spells grew shorter and his memory grew longer. He didn’t do much- mostly he slept for long, uninterrupted stretches, sometimes fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours at a time. 

Jarvis believed the increased sleep was his brain attempting to repair itself. The Asset claimed he’d rather be unconscious than deal with all the awful stuff he was remembering. 

Under the circumstances, it made sense that they didn’t jump into a relationship the way soulmates usually did after meeting. Not that they didn’t interact; the Asset spent most of his shorter naps curled up with Tony. He liked putting his head in Tony’s lap so Tony could play with his long hair while he read through proposals, or falling asleep sitting up with Tony on his lap, thick arms holding him securely against his massive chest. 

They progressed as far as chaste cheek-kisses, but no further. 

It was peaceful. 

Then Tony got the call from Fury that SHIELD had found Captain America. 

* * *

Steve Rogers was a trap. A delicious, tempting, soul-wrenching trap, but a trap nonetheless. 

The worst thing was, SHIELD probably didn’t even know what a fantastic trap they had. When Fury called him up  _ just to let him know _ that they’d found Captain America up in the Arctic and were going to defrost him in SHIELD custody. They’d already gotten a lot of the big chunks of ice off and were now working on carefully defrosting the layers close to his skin so he didn’t end up dying in the process, would he like to see a picture? 

Captain Steve Rogers’ beautiful face turned Tony’s guts to ice and sent shivers down his spine. 

The man laying there in the photo was the same man he’d seen just yesterday in the mirror. Captain Steve Rogers was alive, and he was Tony’s soulmate. 

With an incentive like that, of course he jetted over as quickly as he could. 

Fury was all surprised yet smug smiles and self-satisfied implications that made Tony feel dirty just listening to them, knowing that SHIELD was HYDRA and that Fury played everything far too close to the chest to know for sure if he was HYDRA or not. Tony put up with it, even though it left an oily taste in his mouth. 

Steve Rogers had been willing to die to stop HYDRA. As his soulmate, it was the least Tony could do to save him from it. 

After much fanfare and hollow speeches about ‘heroism’ and ‘the real meaning of patriotism,’ Fury must have finally thought Tony was buttered up enough to lay eyes on the prize. 

Then things fell apart. 

Steve Rogers came bursting down the hallway like a bat out of hell, trailing security guards and some sort of period-piece nurse cosplayer in his wake. He slammed right past Tony and Fury, through an automatic door that didn’t quite open fast enough, and out of sight. 

Fury watched this with nothing more than mild disgruntlement. 

“I thought you said he’d woken up hours ago,” he said to the panting nurse, who’d given up the chase. 

“He did, Sir, but we had to sedate him again almost immediately. There was a problem with his lungs, and Medical was afraid they hadn’t defrosted properly. We’re not sure he even gained consciousness.”

“I would have appreciated it,” Fury said through clenched teeth,  _ “if someone had thought to relay that important information to me.” _

Tony had forgotten how fun it was to watch other people’s schemes fall apart around them. Though he did give the old pirate points for not letting it show just how put out he must be to have not only botched Steve’s introduction to the modern world, but also messed up his gambit to use the good captain to convince Tony to start talking to SHIELD again. 

He trailed behind Fury and the guards on the way out to the lobby, where security announced he’d escaped. 

Sure enough, Steve Rogers stood just outside the building, staring dumbfounded at the skyscrapers and flashing lights of Times Square. 

As they approached, he whipped around to face them. 

His eyes widened, looking at some point over Tony’s shoulder. Then they snapped to meet Tony’s own, and he made a face like the entire world as he knew it was fading away. 

“Where am I?” He said. 

“You’re in New York,” Fury said, in placating-yet-commanding tone #7, as Tony liked to think of it. The one he pulled out when he wanted you to know that he was your friend, and that he was bringing you this bad news as a friend, but also that he had authority you didn’t and all you had to do was listen to him and things would be okay. “You’ve been asleep for a long time, Cap. At least seventy years.”

Cap deflated, like all the air was being forced out of his lungs by a long, uncontrollable sigh of pain. 

“Are you going to be okay, son?” Fury prodded. 

Cap looked up, staring hard at Tony as he replied. 

“I had a date.”

* * *

Tony cornered Steve before he left SHIELD headquarters. 

He played up the playboy look a little more than usual, touching Steve, Fury, and random security grunts who stuck around too long like he honestly didn’t even realize his hand was on their shoulder. 

It made him uncomfortable, the way many things that had come naturally to him before Afghanistan did these days, but every time they passed a glass window he saw Steve’s face staring back at him, and he found the will to keep smiling like nothing was wrong. 

The buildup paid off when he took Steve’s formal nice-to-meet-you handshake and turned it into an affectionate, familiar man-hug. 

Lips just a centimeter away from Steve’s ears, he whispered, “SHIELD is HYDRA.”

Steve tensed in his arms, but Tony didn’t give the good captain’s poor acting skills the chance to betray him. He pulled back immediately, fake smile firmly in place. 

“Well, it’s been fabulous to meet you, Captain. It’s not every day you meet a living legend, back from the dead! They should make a medal, just for that. Call it the Lazarus Award for Defiance in the Face of Death or something. Don’t you think, Blackbeard?” 

He smiled at Fury as though Fury had agreed with him, completely ignoring his impassive face. 

“Unfortunately, time stops for no man, except perhaps Mr. Spangles here, and I’m a very busy man, so I’m gonna head out. But definitely look me up, Cap, I’d love to have that delicious figure of yours on my arm for the club circuit.”

He felt Steve’s eyes on his back all the way down the hall and through the door. 

* * *

Steve showed up at his Malibu house two days later, looking as terrible as if he’d run the whole way there from New York. 

“You said SHIELD is HYDRA, and you’re my soulmate,” he said the second Tony opened the door. 

“Come in,” Tony said. “I’ve spent the past few weeks gathering all the proof I need to expose them, while attacking some of their more easily disrupted operations where I can. Are you here to help, or did you want to see the paper trail?”

“I want to do whatever it takes to make HYDRA go down for good,” he said, which didn’t really answer Tony’s question but made his stance pretty clear. 

* * *

When Steve laid eyes on the Asset, he froze, then leaped the few feet to the couch. His weight sent the whole piece of furniture tipping alarmingly backwards, and the force of impact sent it skidding back several inches. 

“You didn’t tell me Bucky was alive,” he said. (Or, he probably said. It was kind of hard to make out his words with his face pressed into Bucky’s stomach.)

“I didn’t know his name was Bucky,” Tony said slowly. “He’s a HYDRA prisoner turned assassin, and he calls himself the Asset.”

Steve tightened his hug on the Asset, who was apparently Steve’s old buddy and soulmate from the forties, back from the dead. Slowly, Bucky wrapped his one arm around Steve’s shaking shoulders and hugged him back.

Tony stepped outside to give them a little privacy. 

* * *

The night before they headed out to destroy HYDRA once and for all, they sat down together in the lab, watching the final document load compile before Jarvis dumped it all across the internet. 

“When this is done, I’ll take you two on a proper date,” Tony said, eyes never leaving the little green progress bar. 

“Will there be dancing?” Steve asked, gaze just as steady on the screen. 

“Sure. That okay with you, Robocop?”

“So long as HYDRA’s gone forever, anything sounds good to me,” Bucky replied.

“Then it’s a date.”


End file.
